Madness, and How to Live With it

An alicorn walked through Canterlot, the city shining with the sun high above and the weather perfect for taking a stroll. Clear blue sky, warm but not hot sunbeams, and a breeze that gently fluttered the flags placed seemingly at random on the nearby buildings.

But though she walked the street, nopony else did. Nopony else lived there anymore. It wasn’t safe for normal ponies.

If one was to imagine Canterlot cut into squares of area and air without care about what those lines cut, and then those squares rearranged randomly in placement and orientation, it might look something like the city she walked in.

It was… a mess. Buildings scattered throughout the area without reason, sometimes whole, sometimes not, bits and pieces of them in the air. The castle could still be seen, placed on its side high above. Large pieces were missing, but those could be found near it, or on the ground, such that it was the ground anymore.

For just an instant, a running pony appeared, terrified. But in the very next, he was gone. A rare albeit perfectly predictable event in Canterlot. It had been that way for…

The alicorn hesitated, and then decided that it must have been years. Or maybe days. It was hard to tell anymore. Time was just as harmed in the city as was space.

Walk in the garden in the morning, and leave to find yourself in the middle of the night, just by crossing the gate.

But she preferred years. Years meant somepony might have figured it out, that somepony was trying to rescue her from this place. She kept walking.

She walked without fear of the streets and doorways. Without fear of the things that peered from dark areas and watched as she passed. Without fearing for herself, because she was immune to all of the dangers of Canterlot.

She called it the anomaly, and it was both dangerous and maddening. Pieces of it were everywhere, scattered around like confetti. She could see them, but long learned that nopony else could.

Most of them related to the current state of the city, what she had dubbed ‘the jumble’. Those pieces sent ponies everywhere, teleportation without magic or reason. They were semi predictable, each one having at most ten locations that they led to, but the path taken was entirely random. She couldn’t use them to get around, though she wasn’t sure why.

Worse were those that effected time. She was shifted forward and back without harm, but she had seen ponies aged to dust, or others that vanished, presumably because age cannot become negative.

The air was not always safe either. Tiny particles hung in the air in spots, and they never moved. You moved, and they moved through you, with devastating results. That or the air was vacuum, or some unknown chemical makeup thankfully confined to one spot in space, unable to disseminate. She could see those as well, and avoided them with simple ease.

And the things that crawled and ran and scuttled and slithered around the area. They looked like everything, and nothing, their forms shifting like water as they moved. The only constant was that they were deadly, claw and fang and poison appearing reliably when they attacked something. To her, nothing they did held a threat to her; claws clicked harmlessly on her fur, poisons had no effect, and teeth shattered on her legs and wings.

She walked, until she came to the edge of the city, looking out over the cliff. She reached a hoof out, and then snapped it back when something crackled in the air in front of her. She sighed, having expected that, and settled down, to watch the sunset.

She was confined here by a strong force, one that was all too eager to hurt her should she try. And she had tried, but the attempt seemed impossible. No way to combat it, no way to go through it, at least, not for her. It was the only anomaly that harmed her, and the only one that didn’t harm normal ponies.

So she sat, and watched the sun gently fall past the horizon. She never knew if what she was seeing was the passage of time, or if it wasn’t. She lost track of it, as she could no longer feel the requirements of life. She never got hungry, never thirsted, and sometimes she forgot that normal ponies breathed. But the sun’s rise and set was comfortingly constant, when nothing else seemed to be.

The city might be full of space and time anomalies, but beyond was normal. The layout changed with every day, but past the borders never did. The things were never the same, not for one moment, but everything outside changed predictably and slowly.

Outside, she could see the distant Ponyville, and she might just imagine that she could see the ponies that lived there. Ponies that weren’t dead, or soon to be dead, or trapped somewhere, unable to escape, kept in one place for what might just become eternity.

She had seen death too often, and in so many forms. She had become numb to the sight of blood, to the screams that preceded the end of life. She had never been able to help those ponies in time. Never able to find them before they perished, always just a few moments too late. And she knew why.

The reason sat next to her. A pony with no color, and not that he was black or white, but that he had no color. Like he, it, was a hole in reality. It was the reason for all of this, and the cause of everything that had happened.

She had only ever seen its eyes once, and she never wanted to experience that again. Those eyes cut at the soul, drove lessor things to madness and suicide. And though it was a constant shape, it changed just as much as any thing did.

“dfkinkzd nlzwql.” it said, and the alicorn winced. Its voice was painful to her, but she had seen somepony else who had heard it, without her protection. He died. He died slowly, screaming.

“Go away.” she told it, not looking at it. It was always here with her, and sometimes she wondered why. It didn’t get pleasure from seeing a sunset, or watching the reality outside. It hated what was out there, she knew.

“Thjklzw gothvdtli my daughter.” it said, and the alicorn glared at it.

“I am not your daughter.” she said viciously. It didn’t respond, continuing to watch the sun fall and the light fade from orange to black.

She sighed. It never responded, and she wondered if that was a good thing. It was the cause of all this, but it was also the reason why she was safe from it. Why she could see and walk in what other ponies couldn’t.

She had its blessing, and that kept her safe from any thing and any anomaly. If she didn’t have it, she would have been dead a thousand times over.

And sometimes, she wished that she was dead, instead of being forced to watch and be unable to help anypony anymore. It always slowed her down, somehow changing space and time to make a simple run something that took as long as it took for an injured pony to perish in her hooves. She knew that it did that, because every time, it was there. Smiling.

The sun set, and the moon began rising, and she took note of its form. A logical progression, indicating time passing normally. Another things she had taken to tracking, just in case.

“xists fozled my daughter.” it said. It stood as though it had always stood, and then appeared to flicker away, never once actually moving, or even giving the impression of movement.

“I told you I’m not your daughter!” she screamed after it. She huffed. Pointless, but it made her feel better. The only thing it ever said that wasn’t either nonsense or painful was ‘my daughter’ and it was always directed at her.

It was not her parent. She knew that, knew her actual parents, always told it otherwise, and it never, not even once, gave the indication that she ever said anything at all. She could scream whatever she wanted and it would never respond. Not one change, not one impression, not one difference in behavior. It had been that way from the day it arrived. From the day it saved her, and cursed her with its blessing at the same time.

It was always the same, even if it was always different. Constant, because it was never constant. Unless it wanted to be. And sometimes not even then.

It had once driven the alicorn to near madness, trying to figure it out, but she had realized what she was doing and stopped before she truly plunged from sanity. It was truly inscrutable. No more fit to exist than a number greater than itself. It was what it was, and what it was, was nothing, and everything, and everything in between, without regard to reality, or time, or logic.

It was maddeningly different every time, and yet it was constant where it irked her. ‘my daughter’, always being by her side, watching the sunset, and if she did so, the sunrise. And every time it did so: two words, two words, one word, two words, ‘my daughter’, two words, ‘my daughter’. Every single time, and never repeating words, unless she was trying to spot a pattern, in which case it would lead her on and then never do it again.

It didn’t speak. She tried for a long time to figure out if it was before coming to that conclusion. It only made sounds, its only words being ‘my daughter’ and always in tandem, never apart.

She looked back out to the reality denied to her, and sighed. It hadn’t been so long since she had lived in that. A world where things made sense, a place where she could study and arrive at an actual answer. A place free of madness, full of something other than death and danger. A place where she had friends, still out there somewhere. She had made sure of that.

Too late to save everypony, but just enough time to save the most important ones. Just enough time to toss them from the prison before it shut, and save them from the horror that came soon after.

And what made it worse: she had caused it. Everything that happened was her fault. The anomaly would never have come, it wouldn’t be here, hundreds of ponies would be alive, if she had been able to set something down and declare it impossible instead of possible.

One mistake. Just one instant, and everything was done. A few seconds to save ponies, and then an eternity to regret. One spell, and she met it, and it came back with her. And through her, it had done everything. The anomaly would not be here if she had tossed it aside, thrown it away, and not given into her curiosity.

But now it was here. And here to stay it seemed. Nothing she did could make it go away. No magic or action capable of even touching it, much less sending it back to where it came from. She could only keep it here, and through that, deny herself any chance of escaping.

Because what it fed on was her magic. With every spell a new anomaly was born, with every magical exertion it was a little stronger. The greater the spell, the greater the anomaly, something she had realized too late. Something she should have seen earlier, should have sensed in time, but she hadn’t. It had been too fast, and too traumatizing.

Canterlot was a city taken by madness. A place where nothing was as it should be, where merely trying to walk or breathe could be your death. Where an alicorn watched the sun’s set every night, and where a thing that shouldn’t be sat with her.

Outside continued, her only real anchor to sanity. A temporary escape from her prison, even if only in thought. A place that said ‘this can be fixed’. Something that gave her a glimmer of hope.

There were ponies out there, ponies that could figure it out. Ponies that would fight back, and maybe one day break it, and force it back, and dispel the anomalies. They hadn’t come yet, but the alicorn held hope. They would. Time was messed up here, but out there days passed, and things happened, and stayed happened, and happened for logical, predicable reasons.

Instead of governed by a being determined to drive her mad, and to slay every last living thing in its madness.